Chagas disease is a parasitic disease primarily transmitted by triatomine insect bites. It affects an estimated 6.5 million people and causes nearly 10,000 deaths annually, primarily in Central and South America. Serological testing can detect Chagas disease and allow treatment to slow or prevent damage to the cardiovascular system, but testing capacity is limited. Chagas disease symptoms may also appear in ECGs, so automated approaches can help to prioritize individuals for the limited numbers of serological tests and inform the impacts of and treatments for Chagas disease. 

We have shared training data from the CODE-15% dataset, and will introduce more training data during the unofficial phase. We have shared example entries and scoring code in MATLAB and Python, and we will share more complex examples during the unofficial phase. We will open the scoring system in the coming days.

See the Challenge website for more information, rules and deadlines.

As in previous years, we have divided the Challenge into two phases: an unofficial phase and an official phase. The unofficial phase solicits feedback from the research community (i.e., you) to help us improve the Challenge for the official phase, so we require teams to register and participate in the unofficial phase of the Challenge for prize eligibility. Please enter early and often – we need you to look for quirks in our data,  scoring system, and otherwise. We are imperfect (and bandwidth-limited), so please send us suggestions via the forum (see below). We rely on the community to help us to improve the quality of the Challenge each year.

The culmination of the Challenge will be in Brazil at the annual meeting of Computing in Cardiology, where we will present prizes at the closing ceremony. We’re excited to announce that we are once again providing an additional prize for teams from the Global South to encourage representation from underrepresented groups. 

We will post more information on the PhysioNet Challenge website and the Challenge forum as it becomes available, or when your input helps us modify the boundaries and content. Please post questions and comments to the Challenge forum as well. However, if your question reveals information about your entry, please email instead to help us safeguard the diversity of approaches to the Challenge. We may share parts of our replies publicly if we feel that all Challengers should benefit from the information in our responses. We will not answer emails about the Challenge sent to other email addresses.